In A Wrinkle in Time, author Madeleine L’Engle describes a town called Camazotz, a suburban community held captive by a dark force. There, all the houses are exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. The same number of dull flowers dot each yard. Children at play bounce their balls and skip their ropes in perfect unison. Conformity is the law. Up and down go the jump ropes and balls. “Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.”
The key to establishing this uniformity, it becomes clear, is to create a network of citizen informants to report children whose play is not quite right, children who move in “awkward, furtive leaps,” who throw their balls into the air defiantly instead of bouncing them in time.
I can’t help but wonder if the 1962 children’s classic was on Governor Tim Walz’s required reading list in grade school — and if this vignette inspired his COVID-era leadership in Minnesota.
Tim Walz’s COVID-19 hotline, launched in March 2020 to promote Camazotz-like community policing, betrays misanthropy for his constituents and an authoritarian vision for the future of our country.
“In wake of the governor's stay-at-home order, which still allows people to leave their homes for fresh air and runs to stores for essential needs, a hotline has been established that allows anyone to report groups of people that aren't following social distancing measures,” the announcement read. “The hotline number is 651-793-3746. People can also submit reports via email to sahviolations@state.mn.us.”
The site, which was monitored by law enforcement until November, 2020 — long after Black Lives Matter protests resulted in $550 million dollars in damages to downtown Minneapolis — fielded more than 10,000 emails from Minnesotans snitching on their neighbors.
One concerned citizen reported a game of pick-up basketball. Others, a church service that didn’t meet the governor’s “legal requirements,” and a workout class in a local park. Another exposed an illicit birthday party, along with the offender’s name and address. “12 cars were there,” the email read. “He is a St. Paul police officer and should know better! How dare he put his neighbors at risk?!?!”
Violations of Walz’s pandemic-era policies, including mask mandates, business closures and social distancing guidelines, carried penalties of 90 days in jail or fines of up to $1,000.
Walz faced criticism from Republican lawmakers including Senator Jeff Howe, who released a scathing statement. “I vehemently disagree with Governor Walz on the effectiveness of this hotline. Rather than serve as a resource, this hotline will only spread fear and mistrust amongst neighbors and communities,” it read. “We are not a communist country, and we have constitutional rights here in the United States of America.”
Walz defended his plan and refused to move the hotline from the government website. “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.” And later, “it’s for their own good.”
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Walz’s method is more than an eerie footnote from a crisis passed — it’s a hallmark of authoritarian governments, a tool wielded by dictators to quash dissent.
Infamous tyrants of the 20th century perfected the system. In Nazi Germany, Hitler’s Stasi relied on a network of 200,000 informants made up of men, women and children to infiltrate nearly every aspect of life in East Germany. Later called “bystanders,” these Germans turned each other in — along with their Jewish friends and neighbors — at alarming rates.
A 1935 report by the Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in Soviet Russia documented a network of 27,650 resident police agents and 270,777 informants employed by authorities, incentivized to report on friends and family. Stalin’s penal code outlined broad “counter-revolutionary crimes” like contact with foreigners, treason, or anti-Soviet agitation and included “actions, thoughts, or lack of actions” as punishable offenses.
According to a study published in the Journal of Public Economics, Stalin “created the impression that an elaborate network of traitors and saboteurs was endlessly seeking to undermine the Soviet Union’s progress and prestige.” The future of the Soviet Union, then, relied on the vigilance of its citizens in intercepting and reporting “enemies of the people” as a matter of ideology.
In his 2007 book The Whisperers, professor Orlando Figes chronicled intimate stories of humiliation and turmoil during Soviet purges. Life in Communist Russia reduced people to “a breed of whisperers, scared to give full voice to doubts or dissidence, and whispering dark secrets behind the backs of neighbors, friends and even family. Stalin's regime relied heavily on “mutual surveillance,” urging families to report on each other in communal living spaces and report “disloyalty.” Many people did what they could to survive, but they dealt with shame and guilt long after Stalin’s reign.”
Modern tyrants have taken notes. Putin’s policies promote a “necessary self-detoxification” of anti-Kremlin sentiment by snitching on friends and neighbors. China’s band of “student information officers” help the Communist Party root out professors who show signs of disloyalty to Xi Jinping. An app developed for informants in Saudi Arabia inspired Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who followed suit in the wake of his stolen election victory.
“Report the fascist criminals to me so I can go find them! I will protect the people street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood!” he shouted.
We know innately that this tactic is not merely a subversive bid for information. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, parent against child, it cuts at the heart of our human experience, shreds the social contracts that bind our institutions and relationships, and finally, makes freedom a slave to safety by eroding our courage.
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled the dreaded digression in his infamous Gulag Archipelago, “Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn’t just that you don’t put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won’t hear.”
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?,” he continued. “The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough.”
In short order, Solzhenitsyn argues, a coward is demoted from the architect of his own future to a bricklayer, paving flower-lined paths for tyrants.
Walz knows this, and counts on our conformity. On a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising call in late July, he said the quiet part out loud, quipping, “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Here is a bald-faced admission from a leader of the party advocating historical amnesia. Working with a compliant press, Walz would memory-hole the consolidation of government power through draconian lockdowns and medical coercion, all under the seductive guise of public safety.
A stab of recognition should pierce the hearts of those who were raised on L’Engle’s admonitions. Tim Walz, and the party he represents (the CENTRAL Central Intelligence Agency), would very much like to live in Camazotz.
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Several years ago, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter, uncovered three pages that had been cut from the original manuscript of A Wrinkle in Time. Though L’Engle’s editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux decided the pages were too political, Voiklis hoped they would give the public a clearer picture of her grandmother’s authorial intent.
In the rejected passage, protagonist Meg Murray’s father explicitly warns her about the dangers of authoritarianism. But, as Douglas Perry of the Wall Street Journal notes, the book is not a simple allegory. “Instead, it’s about the risk of any country — including a democracy — placing too much value on security,” he wrote.
“…you don’t love security enough so that you guide your life by it, Meg,” Meg’s father explains to her.
Later, she prods him. “I still don’t see why security isn’t a good thing. Why, Father?”
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” he replies, “that it’s the greatest evil there is. Suppose your great great grandmother, and all those like her, had worried about security? They’d never have gone across the land in flimsy covered wagons. Our country has been greatest when it has been most insecure.”
Walz’s authoritarian policy reinforces what C.S. Lewis once wrote about fairy tales — that someday, we’d be old enough to read them again. L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time for more than schoolchildren in 1962. She wrote it for anyone in dire need of clarity and courage. She wrote it for us.
Grace Bydalek is a writer, performer, and administrator based in New York City. She works as a theater critic for the New York Sun, leads Young Voices’ Dissident Project, and is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Image: Washington Examiner
Instagram: @grace_daley
Published in the Washington Examiner in August 23rd, 2024.